The one-line difference
Web analytics measures traffic: how many people visited, where they came from, what pages they saw. Product analytics measures behavior: what people do inside your product, whether they convert, and whether they come back. Web analytics is page- and session-centric; product analytics is event- and person-centric.
What web analytics is good at
Web analytics shines for marketing and content: traffic volume, acquisition channels, referrers, top pages, bounce, and geography. It’s usually lightweight to run and, in privacy-first tools like Plausible or Umami, cookieless. If your question is “is our marketing working and where is traffic coming from?”, web analytics answers it. For a fuller picture, see the open source analytics tools rundown.
What product analytics is good at
Product analytics works on events tied to a person. That unlocks questions web analytics can’t touch:
- Funnels, where do users drop off between signup and activation?
- Retention: do people come back a week or a month later?
- User flows: what paths do users actually take through the product?
- Profiles: what has this specific person done, across sessions and devices?
The deeper mechanics (autocapture, identity resolution, and the insight types) are covered in the open source product analytics guide.
Why teams run both
The two aren’t competitors; they serve different teams and stages. Marketing optimises acquisition with web analytics; product optimises activation and retention with product analytics. A common setup is a lightweight web-analytics tool on the marketing site and a product-analytics tool inside the app. If you’re consolidating or moving off Google Analytics, weigh both needs, the GA alternative comparison and the self-hosted analytics page can help you decide.